A near-totalitarianism of thought, speech, and ideas continues to rampage through the public square. It must be fought, and it must be defeated. And people need to calm down rather than looking for new reasons to take politically correct offense at ever-growing lists of imaginary sleights that never were rooted in animus, racial or otherwise, in the first place.
On June 25, the U.S. Department of Education threatened to fine the University of California, Los Angeles for threatening disciplinary action against a professor who ran afoul of the perpetually offended race police. The department’s concerns are justified. The alleged sin of the professor, Lt. Col. W. Ajax Peris, was to say the N-word as part of reading aloud the famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. To compound his sin, he also showed a documentary film that included a narrator quoting the same word in explaining the history of lynching.
Bizarrely, UCLA is seriously considering a penalty on a professor who was honoring the fight against racism by directly quoting original sources, including King, the civil rights movement’s patron saint. (King himself twice cited the word as an example of the indignity black people faced.) If not even scholars at a university are allowed to quote original source material to elucidate the sources and nature of historical controversies, then we are living in a malignant tyranny of ignorance.
Elsewhere, a Minnesota school system is joining the willfully philistine ranks of those who remove two genuinely anti-racist classics, Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, from their curricula because both include that same word. And of course, benighted protesters are threatening to tear down a famous statue from Lincoln Park in Washington because it shows a black man at Abraham Lincoln’s feet. This despite the fact that the man is actively breaking free of his shackles and arising rather than passively accepting beneficence from Lincoln as some sort of white father — and despite the fact that many freed slaves donated money for that very statue’s construction as a celebration of their liberty.
Likewise, editors in newsrooms across the country are succumbing to radical reporters’ weaponization of racial grievances, even as those reporters reject basic journalistic values of objectivity and facts. On and on go the assaults on reason, history, logic, and context. Of course, wokesters throughout popular culture also are joining the nonsense, with music groups Lady Antebellum and the Dixie Chicks jettisoning the “Antebellum” and “Dixie” from their names — although of course, both words have long and honorable histories completely unrelated to the Confederacy or slavery. As of today, even Dixie Beer will now be renamed.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong — indeed, there is everything right — with thoughtful, contextual reexamination of history. There is nothing wrong with empathy for people’s lived experiences. The problem with today’s rush to judge, punish, and destroy is that the would-be judgments and punishments are neither thoughtful nor contextual.
Likewise, on news shows every day now, reporters and anchors lecture viewers about the nation’s supposedly endemic racism and about the need for “conversations” about it. But the lecturers themselves never listen, which means it’s not a conversation at all.
Barack Obama, the most liberal president in history, has repeatedly admonished the Left about its tendency to shut down debate and suppress free speech. Even agents of change, he said, must “consistently [stay] open to the possibility of reconciliation and [seek] to understand the views, even views that [are] appalling to them, of the other side.”
That’s why the thought police themselves should be policed. Free speech and thought must be protected. Those who despoil those freedoms are the enemies of civilization.
